How best to buy an election in L.A. County: Editorial

What’s the right amount of money for a candidate to spend on a race for office? Well, the amount that wins the contest with the least dollars spent per affirmative vote, obviously.

The rest is less obvious. The political devil is assuredly in the details. While economic studies can and have been performed on the market efficiencies of campaign spending, the same as on any other spending, there is an art as well as a craft when it comes to the best way to parlay available cash into a successful run, whether it’s for a local school board seat or the presidency of the United States.

It can be especially hard to figure the right way — and, yes, even the ethical way, if we can use such a moral term when it comes to down-and-dirty politics — to raise and spend when it comes to winning a race for office in the gigantic arena of Los Angeles County.

The largest county in the nation, with 10 million people living here in the heart of the metropolis of Southern California, is ruled by five members of its Board of Supervisors. That means each supervisor represents fully 2 million people. To give an example of relative power, the average member of Congress in the House represents 700,000 Americans. Members of the California Assembly represent about 465,000 people, and members of the California Senate about 931,000 citizens.

A supervisor? Big job. It’s no wonder the current board is known as the Four Kings and a Queen.

For the first time in a generation, thanks to the impending effects of term limits, there is about to be a major turnover on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. During the current election cycle, with a primary in June and a general election, if necessary, in November, longtime supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky on the Westside and Gloria Molina in East Los Angeles and in the San Gabriel Valley are being termed out of office this year. Then in just two years, perennial power brokers Don Knabe and Mike Antonovich will also be forced out. That’s a sea change for L.A. How best to finance the campaigns of those who will finally replace them?

It’s a crucial question, not the least because once in office, the power of incumbency is such that, barring scandal, only term limits can force an entrenched supervisor from office.

And it’s a question Westside supervisorial candidate Bobby Shriver is asking as he seeks to replace Yaroslavsky. The former Santa Monica mayor, heir to both some personal fortune and vast political capital as a member of the Kennedy family — his mother was President John F. Kennedy’s sister — is questioning how reasonable are the county’s current voluntary campaign spending limits precisely because of the vastness of the area to be represented.

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With 2 million constituents, wearing out the shoe leather by knocking on doors is hardly a practical campaign tactic. Buying television and radio advertising time in a region where the signals reach many millions of voters who don’t have a dog in the fight can be wildly inefficient. But printing and posting targeted glossy four-color mailers is not cheap, either. So Shriver has chosen to become the first Los Angeles supervisorial candidate in the 18 years since spending limits were put in place to opt out of the voluntary spending limits. By putting $300,000 of his own money into the race, he by the current rules can no longer accept donations from others greater than $300 apiece. His opponents, with less personal wealth to draw on, can still accept donations of up to $1,500 per giver.

While Shriver is complaining, and understandably so, that it’s hard to get a message out to so many voters under current limits, his dilemma actually points to the fairness of the system. Have a lot of money of your own to invest? OK, then; you get to take less from others.

But there is a much larger question being begged in the end that is crucial to the future of not just local politics but to the ethical governance of our nation. Outside groups — labor and business interests — don’t operate under the same spending restrictions. In the supervisorial election won by incumbent Mark Ridley-Thomas in 2008, unions spent more than $8 million in ads to help elect him, dwarfing the $1.3 million his official campaign spent.

Recent Supreme Court decisions point only to an increase in the power of these unregulated dollars in American politics.

That’s the heart of the matter here. It’s crazy to pretend there is economic fairness in American politics when special interest on the extremes of the spectrum bring far more to the party on the margins than the rest of us can hope to in the mainstream.